Dead. That was the simple truth of it, wasn’t it? They were all dead. Everyone was dead. Maybe there weren’t any bodies, but that didn’t mean they weren’t still alive somewhere, collected and stored away. Where do you keep six billion people? You can’t.
I tried not to think about it. I didn’t like the way it made me feel. All those souls, gone. Dead. How was I the only one who had survived? And why?
There was, of course, only one explanation for it. But how can a person ever come to terms with something that big? You can’t, so you pretend it’s not there.
One day in early October, I found myself sitting in an IKEA in Virginia eating some smoked salmon on crackers and drinking a warm Coke. I could’ve easily made Florida by then, but for some strange reason I’d gotten it in my head that I wanted to see the leaves turn colors before I went, so I lingered. I’d never thought to pay much attention to scenery before—too busy working, I guess—but there I was, dawdling around as if seeing the brilliant fall colors was the most important thing in the world.
At the time, it was.
Anyway, I was in IKEA having lunch when another memory from that night of the party came back to me.
There’d been bits and pieces—flashes of images, people’s faces—coming back to me. None of it had made much sense to me and I’d tried not to make any sense out of any of the rest. But there was one face that I kept seeing over and over again. It was the woman in the black dress, the woman named Jennifer.
But who the hell was she?
I was sitting there looking at this poster, and advertisement for bamboo shower curtains. A woman was in it wearing a black dress. She had red hair. And suddenly, there I was again, inside my own head standing at the crap table with Ray-Ray and Sonny, and Sonny was saying, “Fresh blood,” and I was saying, “Really? New hire? In whose department?”
“I hear she’s a total bitch,” Ray-Ray had countered.
I laughed, sitting there in the darkness and remembering that. It totally figured Ray-Ray would see her as some kind of threat.
Both Sonny and I ignored him.
Sonny said, “Apparently she’s some kind of superstar. Street brought her in himself, recruited straight out of Cambridge.”
“His new pet project?” Ray-Ray said, making air-quotes and looking snarky.
Again, the cattiness went unanswered. It didn’t need to be acknowledged. Steel’s revolving door affairs weren’t exactly breaking news. In fact, they had been, to many, a thing to be admired.
“Rumor is she’s got a hook on some kind of new-tech from some remote place in the Middle East,” Sonny went on. “Supposed to be quite revolutionary.”
“A new device?” Ray-Ray looked at me, presumably because he thought I had the most to lose if it proved to be something good. In truth, I did, being in charge of new-tech discovery, but I wasn’t worried that someone so obviously fresh out of college would beat me to the punch. “That’s so last week,” Ray-Ray continued. “Everyone knows we need to be looking at new materials.”
“Quit kissing my ass,” I said, laughing. I turned back to Sonny. “So, tell. What is it?”
He shook his head. “No idea. It’s all hush-hush.”
“If it’s all hush-hush,” Raymond sniped—he really didn’t know when to quit—“then how come you know so much about it?”
Sonny gave me a look that I realized only in hindsight I probably should’ve paid more attention to back then. If I hadn’t been so wrapped up in the woman in the black dress, I would’ve.
“Let’s just say it’s got Cal’s sticky fingerprints all over it. Be careful, Trask. You know he’s got a mean streak to him.”
“Don’t you start, too,” I murmured distractedly.
“Just saying. You’ll end up getting bitten. Trust me.”
I shook my head. “Uh uh. Not on my birthday.”
Ray-Ray laughed, maybe a bit too loudly, and gestured at the glitz and glitter around us. “Is that what this dog and pony show is about?”
“Yeah,” I said, smirking, “and maybe she’s my present. You know, I’m getting this sudden urge to unwrap something.”
“Stay away from her,” Sonny said.
But I’d stopped listening by then. I was too busy admiring a beautiful woman through the bottom of an empty vodka glass.
Besides, I really wanted to know about this new-tech device she’d uncovered.
“Hold this,” I said, handing Sonny my empty tumbler, “and shut up. Both of you.”
I remember the look she gave me when I walked up to her: coy, amused, not a bit surprised.
“Jennifer Loulan,” she said, offering her hand before I could even get a word out, “and you’re Hanson Trask.”
“The birthday boy himself. Word gets around I see.”
Cal snorted. “I’ll leave you two alone to get better…acquainted,” he said, before slinking away. I remember it momentarily threw me off my game. I didn’t figure him to give her up quite so easily to me. But then he stopped short, turned, and added, “I want a full report in the morning.”
“What was that all about?” I asked, a bit chagrinned and unsure if he’d been addressing me or her. I could only imagine what kind of “report” he was talking about. The guy was a dog and I didn’t want my private escapades to end up being his kibble.
“Search me,” she teased.
“Is that an invitation, Miss Loulan?”
She laughed that wonderful laugh and said, “Maybe.”
That loosened me up. We talked for a while. She was pretty good at keeping up her end of the conversation. Smart, witty, knowledgeable. I found her quite pleasant. Not a threat at all.
She asked if I wanted to go somewhere more private and I told her I was just thinking the same thing. Then…
Nothing.
It was frustrating, sitting there inside the IKEA, not knowing what happened after that.
I realized that the girl in the poster looked nothing like her. The only similarity was the black dress and the reddish hair. The girl was holding a bottle of shampoo in her hands and smiling.
Come to think of it, Jennifer had been holding something too that night.
I pinched my nose and thought.
Yes. I remember thinking at the time that it looked like a perfume bottle or something.
I remember finding it in my hands the next morning, putting it in my pocket.
I’d kept it. I don’t know why. Several times I’d thought I’d left it behind, but then I’d find it in my pocket again. There was this niggling thought in the back of my mind that it was important, that I might need it someday.
I took it out of my pocket and inspected it again. It was warm, of course, from being so close to my skin. I don’t know how many times I’d taken it out and given it a good looking over, wondering what the hell it was, where it had come from. Wondering why it seemed to hum, yet not make a sound. it was obviously not a perfume bottle.
Close your eyes and make a wish.
That’s what Jennifer had said to me. Her voice.
I looked at the object and wondered: Did it make wishes come true? And then I laughed at myself, self-consciously looking around me, as if someone might be hiding in the darkness, spying on me.
Machines didn’t make wishes come true.
Close your eyes and make a wish.
I remember thinking how silly it seemed, but I’d gone ahead and done it. I’d wanted to humor her.
I remember closing my eyes and saying…
What? That I wished everyone else in the world would just disappear? Really? Why would I want such a thing?
But then I knew. The new-tech project I’d so heavily invested in. I was up to my neck in it with other people’s money—company money—and it was turning into a big pile of shit. I hadn’t told Cal yet. I knew once he found out, I’d probably be terminated. The stress had been getting me. I drank too much. I blacked out. I drank just so I would black out.
I’d wanted to escape.
But wishes don’t come true, not even birthday wishes. If that were true, then I would’ve gotten a cell phone when I turned ten and a hippopotamus at eight. Instead, I’d gotten Legos. Both times.
Still… What if there were something that could do make them come true?
I held the object up to my face. It didn’t look like anything special.
I closed my eyes and concentrated.
“Okay, let’s see if you work. I wish for…”
What did I want? There were all the obvious things: endless electricity, hot water, cold beer. But I’d pretty much come to grips with not having any of those things anymore. I found I didn’t really miss them.
Maybe a little company?
I closed my eyes again.
“I wish Jennifer were here. That’s my wish, so…” I wasn’t sure what the process was. “Um, make it so.”
Slowly, I opened my eyes and peeked out into the darkness.
Standing in front of me was a beautiful woman with red hair and wearing a black dress. I almost gasped before I realized it was just the poster for the shower curtain. Jennifer wasn’t there. I was still alone.
I laughed, but the sound mocked me and I shut my mouth again.
I almost threw the thing away then, but then I realized something else: it wasn’t my birthday. Maybe it only worked on birthdays. To give the thing a proper test, I’d have to wait another ten months. So, once again, I stuck it back into my pocket.
Apparently remembering the bind I’d gotten myself into affected me more than I’d realized. All those people whose money I’d lost. Of course, they were gone, too. But that wasn’t the point. If I hadn’t wished them away, their lives would’ve been utterly destroyed. I’d wished them away, and because of that, they would never have to suffer, but the reason I’d wished them away was to protect myself.
That evening, as I wandered about the empty town of Woodbridge, I suddenly had a craving for vodka.
I had no idea where to get Diaka, so I just broke into the closest liquor store I could find and took the most expensive bottle on the shelves. It wasn’t Diaka, but then again, so what. I grabbed six more of the thirty-dollar bottles, dusting them off as I did. It was as many as I could carry in my arms. I hadn’t had a drink in weeks, and my tolerance wasn’t as high as it had once been. The alcohol tasted just fine. And the quality of the blackout was just as good as I remembered it. It numbed me enough so that I could carry on.
That was the first night of a month-long binder that stretched from Woodbridge all the way down to the southern tip of Florida. I have only fragmented recollections of the trip, moments of sobriety broken by frightening periods of emptiness. A testament of my recklessness came to be written all over the sides of the ‘Ghini, a litany of scratches and dents, of near-misses and not-so-near-misses that I somehow survived. God protects fools and children, right?
All those children. Gone.
What the hell had I done?
I sobered up one morning and found that I was just a few miles from Daytona Speedway. I had some pretty dark thoughts going through my mind then, and they were all telling me to go there, so I did, crashing through the chained and padlocked gates and spilling out onto the raceway with a quarter-million dollar car that I was well on my way to trashing. Well, I just needed to finish the job.
After bolstering myself with a bottle of expensive champagne, I gunned the engine and steered the car out onto the track. I decided to end it all there.
“A man’s death liberates his soul,” I said, as my tires raised smoke behind me. “Humanity’s death liberates the world.” I don’t know if I believed that. I sure wanted it to be true.
I took her up as fast as she could go, but I found I was too terrified to crash, even in that state. I’m not sure how many laps I went before something flashed in front of me. I lost control, smashed into the wall, careened away from it. For a split second I thought the car might flip. It didn’t. Instead, it went sliding into a parked fuel truck.
My head crashed into the window and all I was aware of was pain, growing until it engulfed.
I woke up to find myself bruised and bleeding. It was almost too much just to breathe. I didn’t know which parts of me still worked and which didn’t. The car was smoking but there weren’t any flames. My door was gone. The hood on the passenger side was badly caved in and there was blood splattered over the windshield on the outside. As for what I’d hit out there on the track, I had no clue. I just knew it wasn’t human.
Somehow I managed to crawl out and take inventory of myself. My neck, back and arms seemed okay, battered, but not broken. Breathing was an agony just one notch above unbearable, so I couldn’t be sure my ribs were all intact. Further down, I hadn’t been so lucky. Scrapes, bruises, burns. My knee was swollen and red. My ankle was fractured. I had no doubt about that. My foot was bent the wrong way and my leg felt as if someone had overinflated it.
It took a long time, and I passed out more than once, but I finally got my sneaker and sock off. The ankle was swollen and a Pantone catalogue of purples and reds covered it. It looked like eggplant parmesan.
That night lasted an eternity. I spent it laying there in the middle the raceway, alternating between moments of excruciating pain and numb lucidity. The stars wheeled about in the sky above me, mocking my stupidity and arrogance. On several occasions, I heard something grunting in the darkness, off to one side. I couldn’t tell what it was. I didn’t know if there were crocodiles or alligators in that part of Florida. I envisioned wolves loping through the darkness, drawn by my scent and the smell of fresh blood.
Once, I became aware of munching sounds coming from somewhere off to my left. I could hear crunching noises and snarling, what sounded like a branch snapping, followed by flesh being torn. I screamed and whatever it was that was feeding on whatever I’d hit ran away. But then it returned. They returned.
By the time dawn broke, I’d screamed myself hoarse. I realized that the only thing more terrifying than living with the truth of what I’d done, was dying because of it.
I knew I had to correct whatever I’d done. I had to wish everyone back.
I just had to live long enough to do it.
† † †
I was laid up for several weeks. I had done a horrible job of patching myself up, and when I was actually able to walk again without crutches or a cane, it was with a nasty limp. More weeks passed, but the pain lingered. The pain killers took most of the edge away. The alcohol did the same for my mind. But neither could make me forget the truth or dull my guilt.
Winter came and went. The pain in my ankle, inside my head and in my heart, remained.
I spent a lot of time on the beach, just sitting there doing nothing, thinking nothing. I eventually came to hate the sight of the ocean—not the vastness of the water and its power in the face of my own frailty, but the thought of all those grains of sand along its shores. I imagined that every single one of them was a person. Earth was an ocean without its beaches. I had swept them clean.
Still, I made myself sit there and suffer. And then, something miraculous happened: everything began to change. I began to appreciate again what I hadn’t seen before: the beauty of the world in the absence of people.
I saw sunrises and sunsets unmarred by smog. I saw wild animals reclaiming the land. I saw terrifying thunderstorms and hurricanes and was nearly washed out to sea once when a wave knocked me off a rock and into the water.
Not even a year since I had removed all of humanity from the face of the planet, the cities were already starting to crumble away. The Earth was healing itself.
Spring passed; summer arrived.
My hair had grown out, and so had my beard. I’d stopped cutting my fingernails, stopped bathing. But then, one morning as the rising sun broke through the lingering thunderclouds from a storm the night before, I realized that I was almost completely happy.
I just needed to take care of more thing.
† † †
As the pla
n took shape, I knew I was putting all of my faith into something I had no understanding about. I’d always lived my life immersed completely in technology. Science was my religion. But I’d come to view the object in my pocket as something else altogether. It was beyond science. How it worked was beyond anything I knew or understood. It wasn’t technology; it was magic.
I started calling it the Wishing Stone. Faith told me it was what allowed me to render the world the way I was seeing it now, rather than the way I had always known it before.
But I was still a man of analytical thinking. Not knowing how the object worked, I knew my best chance at getting it to work was to replicate the conditions of the previous occasion exactly. I became convinced that I needed to be back in exactly the same place, in Cliff Dwellers, and that I would need to be there on my fortieth birthday. I had two months to get back to New York.
I drove back in a station wagon I found in someone’s driveway. The keys weren’t hard to find. I wanted something that got decent gas mileage, as it was getting harder to extract fuel from cars by then. And I wanted something safe. I was suddenly feeling very vulnerable again.
I arrived in the old neighborhood in late June and immediately found a place to stay down near Pier Eleven, right at the southern end of Wall Street. The building had a full water tank on its roof. I rigged a series of pipes to deliver it down to me and used canned fuel to heat it.
The city was just as I’d left it, except the fires that had been burning ten months before had long since burned themselves out and weeds were proliferating in places they’d never had a chance to grow before. Things were starting to look wild and unkempt. Almost natural. I wanted to hasten the process.
Insomnia: Paranormal Tales, Science Fiction, & Horror Page 7